10 02 2025 evening

The countryside slipping by — the point of trains is to remind you of someone’s hand moving through your hair at exactly this speed (scaled down appropriately).

At the level of spirit, I am late; at the level of body, I’m early. At the level of spirit divided by body times two, I’m right on time (as are you) —

But explicitly aiming at mutual orgasm is a touch pathetic, no?

The danger is in using time to measure the body; the body already measures time perfectly well —

The body is the hole in the world through which time leaks out —

Sex being the fantasy of plugging someone else’s sluices, marriage being the fantasy of plugging the sluices’ sluices — but sluices don’t have sluices, cries —weeps! — the rationalist. Oh, don’t they? Dogs don’t have dogs? People don’t have people? What do they have? ‘Reasons’?

He who could only have loved x has failed to love anyone — love singularises, but only retroactively (the more open it is at the beginning, the more closed it will be afterwards).

‘Love at first sight,’ meaning: with reference to the memory of her as a natural object, just as a street, a star, a God, is a natural object. For a subject, there is no ‘first sight’; the subject exists as the ongoing annihilation of all beginnings.1

11 02 2025 morning

Waking up, sitting around, thinking about a couple of things, the hum of a car, never really liked that, cars, vehicles, things, cities, just not my bag, not sure why I came to Rome in the first place, less a city and more a sort of complicated cake made of four or five dissolved civilisations, none of which are all that interesting —

Pro the immediate reparation of all artefacts: return history to its place of occurrence simply so other people don’t have to deal with it. Only the spear cures the wound, just as only the absence of the spear cures the absence of the wound2 —

As long as no one starts repatriating the sea, if the government suddenly declared ‘we’re going to annihilate the sea,’ or ‘we’re moving the sea somewhere else… we won’t tell you where it is,’ yeah, that would rouse me from my slumber, I’d immediately start going door to door, chatting to my neighbours about it, maybe I’d begin a series of social media interventions, maybe I’d get interested, for the first time in my life, in graphic design —

Said to J when K half broke up with him the other day: well, it’s not like she’s banning the sea, is it? It’s not like she’s taken the whole sea and moved it somewhere, behind some kind of enormous fence? It’s not like she turned around one day and simultaneously privatised every single ocean, turned it all into some kind of sick real estate? Is it? No —

12 02 2025 afternoon

I have to walk past it at 6mph, only then I can start to see the beauty of it, even the Colosseum, as long as I’m self-propelled and walking embarrassingly fast, more or less just pushing people out of the way, at the very least glaring at them ominously —

I have to fix my face into a certain glare so that my spirit can, contrapuntally, relax; with a sufficiently obnoxious facial expression in place, directed at some innocent person, I can start experiencing something like the ‘free play of the faculties.’3 The only problem is if it gets too dark, I mean I don’t like to be misinterpreted, it’s unpoetic, and with insufficient ambient light available I might be viewed not as ‘mysteriously hostile’ but rather as constipated, or even mentally ill, interesting questions, but ones which I can’t go into here, there’s not enough space —

But you’ve got to respect them, after all important historical events have a tendency to involve large numbers of people; history, which is itself the history of large-scale events constantly slipping deeper into their self-generated concealment, can only be grasped by an equally enmassed and mediafied interpretative technique —

History, in other words, can only be dreamed collectively, and collective dreams must have as few details as possible, must be as uninteresting as possible, something of which Carl Gustov Jung was well aware. And just as it was possible to avoid historical events when they occurred simply by going to the countryside, the only way to avoid the mass interpretation of these same events is by staying in the countryside; just as the Napoleonic army never penetrated the town of x because it was not, they said, ‘strategically important,’ so the 45th division of the 2025 pan-Eurasian tourist army leave the town of x well alone because it’s not, they say, ‘aesthetically important’ (accurately enough: aesthetics is nothing but the memory of violence). And if the pan-Eurasian tourist army seems somehow enlarged, too numerous to perfectly mirror its original — the Napoleonic army of 1812 — that’s only due to certain demographic shifts, e.g., the inclusion of women, children —

13 02 2025 afternoon

What’s your plan, my mother asked, on my seventh or eighth birthday, don’t become Wallace Stevens, I said, I know it’s not a career or anything but I have a lot of conviction in this regard, it’s sort of the centre of my being to be honest, so I reckon I can use it like an anchor, to keep me grounded, and then a little later perhaps I can start thinking in broader, more strategic, terms. What if you’re just suffering from the anxiety of influence, my mother asked. Look mum, I said, I’m anxious about a lot of things — you’re making me anxious right now, to be honest — but not about this, quite the opposite, actually I’m very confident I won’t become Wallace Stevens, and didn’t you say confidence was the opposite of anxiety, in fact, didn’t you say — okay son, my mother suddenly interjected, it’s your life, we’re not going to try to control it or influence you this way or that, if we do have some thoughts, quite accidentally, then we won’t state them out loud, we won’t let them take on any objective-social form, we’re going to love you unconditionally, if you don’t become Wallace Stevens and if you do, it’s all the same to me, my mother said. All the same to you, I said, what the fuck, my only idea is to not become Wallace Stevens, that’s all I’m going to base my selfhood on from now on, so how the fuck can it be all the same to you if I do or don’t succeed, what kind of love is that, that’s some Wallace Stevens ass love you’re promulgating, ma. Well, son, my mother said, if I can be frank, and I don’t love you any the less, I’m not sure you really grasp —

okay what